be focusing on the exiguous human remains at Rome from around 1000 as “cor-
roboration.”^132 It is not only ancient scholars who cannot abide a vacuum.
THE INTERVENTION OF TIMAEUS
We are left with the basic questions: who first down-dated the foundation from the
heroic period, and what was at stake in doing this? What kind of levers did this
new dating give the ancient writers, what did it enable them to allege or deny or
construct? On the basis of the surviving evidence, the man who first down-dated
the foundation of Rome from the mythical period was the first Greek historian to
tackle the subject of Rome on any substantial scale — Timaeus of Tauromenium.^133
Strictly, this is an argument from silence, since someone else theoretically could
have done this before him without leaving any trace in the record. But on our
available evidence there is no one before him.^134 He is, as Herodotus would have
put it, the first man of whom we know, and Timaeus is the right man, in the right
time, and fromthe right place, even if not exactly inthe right place — he is actually
writing in Athens, but he comes from Sicily. We cannot pin down when he wrote
or published this radically new version of when the city of Rome came into exis-
tence, since he was writing actively for fifty years before he died sometime in the
late 260s b.c.e.Sometime in the first third of the third century b.c.e.will serve as
a peg to orientate our investigation.
Timaeus, however, did not bring the foundation date all the way down into the
eighth century. He fixed on a moment in time that is reported by Dionysius of
Halicarnassus as thirty-eight years before the first Olympiad, “814/3 b.c.e.”^135
Timaeus, then, is actually the first person to give a year date for the foundation of
Rome, since all the earlier stories from the Trojan period were undated and undat-
able. Now, this is a shift of unmistakable significance. Unlike everyone before him,
he says that the city of Rome was not founded in the heroic period of the nostoi,
but hundreds of years later, over five hundred years later, by the date of “1334” that
he used as the era of the fall of Troy.^136 He did not perform this down-dating for
Rome alone. In the last chapter we saw that his Roman foundation date is a sym-
bolically charged synchronism with Carthage, and he did to Carthage exactly what
he did to Rome, breaking radically with tradition here as well. Before him, every-
one had dated Carthage to the heroic period of the nostoi,but Timaeus moves its
foundation date hundreds of years closer to history, bringing it to lodge on the
same time line as Rome, in “814/3.”^137 What kind of “evidence” he controlled or
contrived in the case of either Rome or Carthage is beyond recovery, even though
- Myth into History I: Foundations of the City